spirit filled women

six strong women

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 29^th, 2024

ORDINARY SUNDAY 26

 

 

edited excerpts from Esther 7 and 9

 

I overworked you a little last week and don't want to repeat that dose this week. But there is a bit of ground to cover – I will do my best to compensate by last week’s effort by simply floating ideas for you this week.

But you may recall in passing last week I hinted at what we should call “the force of the feminine” in our triune God. I don't want to cover that ground again, except to remind you that there have been many strong and eloquent women in the last four decades or so who have rightly reminded us, and forcefully reminded us, of the ways in which our understanding of God has been limited by the habits of maledom.

Without justification for example we have assumed male pronouns for God, yet even Jesus himself, while he speaks of God as father, also uses quite an intimate non-gender specific name for God, and even uses feminine images of his own ministry as he laments over his beloved city of Jerusalem. But more of that another time.

We have also with absolutely no excuse insisted on using male pronouns for the third person of the Trinity, she who, as we will sing later in this service, “sits like a bird, brooding on the waters, hovering on the chaos of the world’s first day.”

In the passage from Proverbs that some of us heard last week we encountered the strength of a godly woman, filled with divine feminine force, revealing the godly strength that dwells in her. We encountered too the strength of the biblical Naomi, mother of the equally stroppy Ruth, who carried in her loins, in whakapapa terms, genealogical terms, the genesis of King David and of Jesus the Christ. The women in the whakapapa of Jesus were not the sort who would take sedately the obscene and misogynistic claims for which one of the two candidates for president of the USA is infamous in his revolting boasts about conquering women with his alleged fame.

Today we catch a glimpse of one of another rare named woman who escaped the anonymity of Hebrew and Christian scriptures; the tricky, enigmatic and definitely unbowed heroin of the Book of Esther. I have used only representative slices of Esther; in the 21^st century, when we are bombarded with so many faces of violence in the world as we eat our dinner or breakfast, I don’t think it is necessary to be reminded of the brutal ways in which human beings execute each other.

But I do think it is necessary to be reminded of the strength and courage of those who stand up for justice. It is worth remembering as we glimpse a slice of the Book of Esther that not all are card-carrying adherents of our faith. The book of Esther, as I mentioned in my notes, contains no direct reference to God, yet it explores the strength and integrity of a woman who stands up in the face of evil.

We do not need to think hard or long to know that there have been many in human history. Some I could name would be controversial: I think of the young and feisty Greta Thunberg, or even more controversially Phoebe Plummer, and Anna Holland.  Others are less controversial, as I think of Malala Yousafzai, and her fight for education for young women and girls in Pakistan, Nigerian Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who in her novels and public addresses has fought to defend women from exploitation and market manipulation; lesser-known Clara Gouin, a stay-at-home mom in Maryland; Donna Shimp, in New Jersey, who, like Gouin, fought Big Tobacco in the USA; Erin Brockovich who fought groundwater contamination in California; Rosa Parks, who fought for civil rights in Alabama and the wider USA.  Oh? And in New Zealand? Historically it’s hard to go past Kate Sheppard who fought for women’s voting rights, of even our own Penny Jamieson who did her best to crack the glass ceiling that women faced – and to a lesser extent still face – in New Zealand Anglicanism.

Some of these were card-carrying Christ-bearers. Others were bearers of what I might call the ethos of Christ, we might even say the Spirit of Christ, the Spirit of Jesus.

And therein lies a challenge – addressed by Jesus himself, in our gospel passage today, as he proclaims “anyone who is not against us is for us.” For we as a Christian, a Christ-bearing community are challenged to speak up, in word and deed, where we see injustice, and to stand with others, regardless of faith, as they do too. We need to ensure that we, to borrow Jesus’ example, stand in solidarity with all who bear a cup of water to the thirsty, and stand in firm opposition to those who cause the weak to stumble. Finding when and when not to do that is a journey of discernment to which we are all called  to engage in prayer and discourse, so that we can bear Christlike justice and compassion wherever we live and work.

like a child, be powerless

 

SERMON PREACHED AT ST PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

and ST PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 22^nd, 2024

 

 

Proverbs 31: 10-31

Mark 9: 30-37

 

 

As I sat down to get my head around our readings I found myself in a fascinating three-world kaleidoscope of information. As I often do I broke all my rules and omitted the psalm from our liturgy today; I did so in order to emphasise the magnificence and the radicalism of the very distinct passage from Proverbs. As that was reverberating through my mind I was also reading powerful writings by Bishop Penny Jamieson and some of the leading women’s voices from this diocese in the late 1980s and early ’90s. And if that wasn’t enough I find Jesus telling me that I am to become, you are to become, even the church is to become as if a small and seemingly unimportant, nameless child.

Early in my theological journeys I leaned to emphasize what I refer to as the powerlessness of the Cross. Against the glorification of Jesus’ death it is an emphasis on the absolute absence of glory. More – the absolute absence of what we might call headline material in the events of the life and death and teachings of Jesus.

Does it matter. Let me at least hint at an explanatiuon.

As the disciples came to Jesus arguing on the road they were arguing about greatness and magnificence and neon lights or their firstst century equivalent. They were arguing about glory and greatness and headlines. Jesus, poignantly aware of the likely outcome of his conflict with authorities, turned instead to a powerless child, devoid of rights in his or her society, and said, effectively, be like this child, be this child.

Be vulnerable, be nameless, be someone who unlike the principalities and powers against which Saint Paul railed, unlike them, be without rights, be without power, be no one. As he soon would become no one, no person.

Let me turn for a moment to the woman of strength in Proverbs. This acrostic poem of course celebrates, as the opening line puts it, a remarkable woman. But a strong woman in her day was hardly a Margaret Thatcher if I may be a little historic, or, to maintain an even balance between the right and the left, a Helen Clark. And she was, in any case, cited as a contrast to the humdrum state of most of her kind.

This idealised woman of the book of Proverbs is at least in part a celebration of the mysterious figure we call Wisdom, the feminine force of God that came to be identified closely with the Christian understanding of Holy Spirit. But she is also a woman, and the very fact that women like her, like Ruth, like Naomi, who stand out in the Old Testament stand out precisely because opportunity for women to stand out were so few and far between. That should remind us that political and military and physical power still remained firmly in their hands of those with a Y-chromosome.

In 1991 Penny Jamieson, whose trailblazing journey cost her, I sense, so deeply delivered a remarkable address to women in the Waikato, reminding them amongst other things that the consecration of the world’s first female bishop was not the ushering in of Utopia, not the glorious and final entrance into the Promised Land, but just one step along the way as women and men in church and society, but primarily in the body of Christ, learned the meaning of Paul’s words: “neither male nor female.”

Woven into Penny’s address and, I think, her thought generally was the recognition that traditional models of power, especially patriarchal models of power, are counter gospel. Waving big sticks is not the way of the child – well it is when children are playing or misbehaving, but not the way of the child that Jesus places as a counterculture in the midst of the arguing disciples. It is not the way of the Giod who becomes powerless, for us, with us.

The church has a long way to go towards realising Penny’s ideal, and she herself is forced to admit in her address that she does not always attain it.

“The call to Christian women today is not to be contented with the Promised Land, with its isolated and all-too-temporary ecstasy, but rather to reach in open and shared vulnerability with men to the Cross of Christ and for the fulfilment of all that is promised in that Cross; to a future in which there will be “neither man nor woman.”

As part of that we are being called to rely not on social standing or other un-God power, but on the simplicity of powerless, authentic faith. Faith in the one who became utterly powerless for us. And there the journey of being church in the 21^st century begins.

Penny herself, and every female church leader since her (and there have been too few in this country) were often forced into a power-mongering mould. We are not, she emphasised, as yet, in the Promised Land.

We are though in challenging and uncertain times. We have been for some decades, but are arguably increasingly so. Certainly as church we are being forced rightly or wrongly to the fringes of society, forced rightly or wrongly to surrender much that our forebears took for granted. I make no secret of the belief that I believe an awful lot of our infrastructure will disappear in the next decade. Our buildings, our paid clergy (and yes, that is me), our few remaining privileges in the community will gradually turn to dust. 

There is more than one way to walk along the road arguing who is the greatest. If nothing else my research in the history of the diocese has reminded me that an awful lot of ink was spent in subtle forms of affirming that we, not they, (whoever “they” might be), should have the place of honour after the table. 

Those days are gone, and I believe that to be a work of the Spirit as we learn to be a gospel people whose mission is built on service and confession and love, and not on any expectation that we are great or important in society.

And if all this is a little esoteric as we weave together readings from Proverbs, from a former diocesan bishop, and from a powerful teaching moment as Jesus turned to face his own looming lopsided struggle with authorities and almost certain death, if all this is a little esoteric it is because the challenge is to see through a different lens, to see our mission no longer as a people with standing in society, but as a servant people with open arms and willing hearts. Our challenge is to be an unimportant people of God walking on that unspectacular road to Jerusalem and cross and above all resurrection hope.

who wouldn't does

 

SERMON PREACHED AT ST PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

ST PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 8^th, 2024

James 2:14-17

Psalm 146:5-10

Mark 7: 24-30

 

In Matthew 21, and unique to Matthew, Jesus tells a little parable of two sons. Son One says he will and then doesn’t, while Son Two says he won’t and then does. That is the Readers Digest version. But it is a useful key by which to explore the two loosely related passages that pop up this Sunday.

There are one or two or more parables in which Jesus may be interpreted as a character in his own story. They’re not necessarily the ones about judgement and gnashing teeth. It was, I think originally the great Swiss Protestant scholar Karl Barth who first offered a radical interpretation of, for example, yet another parable, the much more well known Parable of the Prodigal Son. It might equally have been tortured Danish poet-philosopher-theologian Søren Kierkegaard; either way we are invited to dare to read that parable with Jesus as the son who travels into the far country, a country of murk, mire, and human grottiness. That son becomes  desperate and unclean.

Paul often indicates that Son-Jesus goes into grot for us. Even death on a cross. As one who subscribes to a theology of divinization, or as Anne puts it in her recent book, theosis, I would prefer to say that Jesus enters into the grot with us in that parable. There he turns our sows’ ears into silk purses, our mourning into joy. 

Matthew’s Parable of the Two Sons, is often interpreted demonically. It has been used obscenely to generate what is called a supercessionist doctrine of salvation. That is an evil reflection, seeing the flawed Hebrew and an irredeemably flawed people who say yes and then don’t, and the blessed Christian people who allegedly say no but even more allegedly then do.

It’s wrong. It’s demonic.  

Read properly, attuned to the whole Jesus story, that parable is however a useful tool when stripped of those demonic undertones of racial hatred. Perhaps Jesus told the story to gently poke fun at himself, as he realised that his vision of mission had been changed by a desperate outsider, an unclean woman, a foreigner. 

At the very least the parable of the Two Sons provides a useful key to this remarkable encounter of Jesus and a desperate Gentile woman.

These parables need to be held in tension, and can provide a key as we explore the great dichotomy of James (probably the brother of Jesus) with his emphasis on getting out there and doing it, Mark telling a story of a Syrophoenician woman who redirects the mission of Jesus, becoming the son who said he wouldn’t do but then does. 

The woman’s desperate longing realigns Jesus from an exclusive commitment to the people who allegedly said yes but then didn’t, to hearing our heart cries, too. For we are the people who in our DNA (or whakapapa) originally said no but then did. Jesus Who Wouldn’t becomes Jesus Who Does hear the heart cry of the Gentiles, our heart cry,  my heart cry and yours and the heart cry of every human in a hell hole of despair.

Scholars have spent a lot of ink arguing whether Jesus was playing games with the Syrophoenician woman, knowing all along with perfect knowledge what his plan was, a sort of mucking around to test the depths of the her faith. In that rather cynical reading and variations of it, Jesus knew all along that he would heal the child. 

I am happier with a reading that suggests she in a sense “converts” his understanding of mission through her desperation and passion. God hears passion.

The argument is asking the wrong questions. The Jesus who reveals the heart of God will respond always to the heart cries of those who are suffering. And let’s not kid ourselves: this does not mean that suffering suddenly ceases. Nevertheless, as the author of the quotation in my comments on the psalm makes clear,[1] God, seen or unseen, enters into the deepest hell holes of human suffering and breathes resurrection light.

I am not expecting you to follow some sort of sequential argument here. There isn’t one. We need to take from Jesus’ encounter with this desperate woman a reminder that in Jesus the God who is revealed is the God who will enter into the deepest places of human experience. We need to take from James’ feisty passage the reminder that it is no use believing this unless we are prepared to get our hands dirty in the places where people are hurting. 

In the encounter with the feisty Syrophoenician woman, a foreigner, an outsider, a person Jesus the Jew is not meant to hobnob with, he does hobnob. 

In this encounter Jesus may or may not be coerced to change his mind, change his vision; we need not be afraid of interpretations that suggest that, for Jesus himself tells yet another parable of a desperate woman who knocks endlessly on the front door of the home of a sleeping judge in order to get her way. Jesus both reveals and speaks of the God he calls “Father,” God who does respond to the deepest cries of the human heart – though awkwardly we have to add a sort of rider saying “even if we can't see it.”

We can also rest assured that if we are going to find Jesus as a character in his own parables he will turn up in places that shatter our expectation of where a nice God should be. One of my favourite phrases which I have either stolen or coined is “what’s a nice God doing in a place like this?” Mark, James, and even the Psalmist, remind us of that tricky realisation that God will be who God will be and is not limited by our boundaries and expectations.

[1] “Happiness is not the absence of pain and trouble but the presence of a God who cares about human hurt and who acts on behalf of the afflicted and the oppressed.” J. Clinton McCann “The Psalms,” New Interpreter's Bible, vol. 5, 1264.